You may be familiar with Bruce Tognazzini, who is widely considered the father of the Macintosh UI. He's no longer at Apple, but he is part of the Neilsen Norman dream team. He also maintains a website with the ten most wanted UI design bugs:
15 Dec 2008 sorts as being before 2 Jan 1900
True, but that’s in large part because we insist on continuing to use silly English-centric non-hierarchical date formats for no readily apparent reason other than “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.
The ISO format 2008-12-15 sorts after 1900-01-02 and has the further merit of being unambiguous throughout the world.
(Caveat: This will result in a Y10000 sorting bug where a simplistically sorted 10000-01-01 will sort after 9999-01-01, but I can live with that, grin).
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Lawrence.
Seriously, your blog doesn’t escape angle brackets in a comment post??
“Focus-stealing”
I find this probably the worst UI problem of modern operating systems. It’s unbelievably irritating.
“True, but that’s in large part because we insist on continuing to use silly English-centric non-hierarchical date formats for no readily apparent reason other than “that’s the way we’ve always done it”.”
Why should the year be first when it’s not the most useful piece of information? If I’m scanning a list of dates, I need the months to get myself roughly there and then the days.
The larger bug is the persistent assumption that data means “a series of symbols from the set of Unicode codepoints.” Okay, there is whitespace in there, but beyond that “data” means plain text, which doesn’t really mean anything.
“A more usable way” for whom, Don? Not for virtually every American. We don’t think of today as “nine April two-thousand eight.” We think of it as “April ninth, two-thousand eight,” and therefore it’s far more usable to see the numbers written in the same order we would say the words: 4/9/2008. That said, the only true way to handle dates is to retrain all of our brains (expect for perhaps Asians, many of whom already use this system) to use the yyyy-mm-dd format. It sorts correctly and is always unambiuous.
Now, having said all that, I actually disagree with Tog’s complaint about ASCII sorting. I’m a programmer, I know how things work under the covers, and I EXPECT ASCII sorting…when I’m viewing TEXT. And that’s exactly what file names are: text. One of the first things I do on any XP install is turn off the new “sort-it-as-a-number-if-I-can” sort order. But, as I said, I expect this as a programmer, and I can understand how other users might like the numeric sorting.
Date-lists should sort dates first by year, then by month, then by day (YYYY.MM.DD). Or just sort by time desc or asc. But they should show dates as first day, then month, then year (DD.MM.YYYY).
This achieves that the dates are sorted correctly, but showed to people in a more usable way. So people can start processing first the day then the month, which are more significant than the year. Of course people scroll the correct year and month onto sight first, if they are not visible right away.